Five years ago, a gang of well-off teenagers in suburban Los Angeles burgled the homes of a number of local celebrities, including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, stealing their personal possessions to the tune of $3 million, carrying on with the spree for nearly a year, despite being caught on security cameras.

In the autumn of 2009, they were arrested after a tip-off — and became minor celebrities themselves, dubbed “The Bling Ring” by the LA Times. A Vanity Fair reporter, Nancy Jo Sales, wrote a piece about them, called The Suspects Wore Louboutins, early in 2010 — and Sofia Coppola (director of Lost in Translation and Somewhere, and a bit of an actress, model and celebrity herself) optioned it to make this film, based all too closely on the true story.

The Bling Ring opens quite promisingly, showing the gang breaking into a house in the dark and whooping “Let’s go shopping!”. The clothes and shoes they’ve stolen are gleefully shown off on Facebook — and then they’re seen on an evidence list too. It’s a story that obviously raises some interesting questions about celebrity culture, consumerism and the delusions created by social media. Perhaps these witless teenagers were only acting out what the culture that has created Hilton and Lohan tells them to do? Perhaps the lifestyles of their victims were themselves so excessive and over-displayed that these can be considered almost victimless crimes?

These questions are thoughtfully addressed in the book The Bling Ring that Nancy Jo Sales has now published about the case. They are barely present in Coppola’s film, which soon reveals itself to be grimly repetitious, simply showing these kids stealing, then partying, taking pictures of themselves and putting them on Facebook, over and over again, until they are caught.

The filming is pleasingly fluent but almost obsequious as the camera follows these twerps into houses and parties, staying with them all the time, never framing them in a way that would imply distance or judgment (save perhaps for a sequence when a pair break into the brightly lit cubic house of a reality TV star called Audrina, which is filmed statically from a distance as they check out room after room).

Coppola has used digital for this movie, appropriately enough, since these wretches live in an entirely digital world (when the ringleader is arrested she is gratified to find that TMZ has reported her as a person of interest in the burglaries) — and there are lots of sequences made to look like surveillance footage and so forth.

The thumping soundtrack, though, mainly rap, seems enthusiastically to endorse the crimes — and you soon realise that not only is this not any kind of morality tale, it’s barely even satirical about either the gormless perps or the trash celebs. The truth is that the movie’s own core appeal is to lifestyle gawping too. Thus the big sell is that Paris Hilton herself appears in the film briefly — and the scenes in which her house was burgled over and over again (it took her a while to notice) are indeed shot in her jaw-droppingly vulgar mansion, with its own nightclub and rooms full of innumerable shoes and sunglasses and jewellery and pictures of herself. So you get to go into her home for real along with the kids. Woah! As they keep saying.

And then there’s our own Emma Watson, off Harry Potter, as Nicki, the most ambitious of these teenagers, performing a sort of half-hearted pole dance chez Paris. She’s pretty good and has some great lines, derived from her original, solemnly saying outside the court-room, “I believe that I’m an old soul” (don’t we all?) and “I think it’s my journey to push for peace and the health of the planet”.

But mostly these teenagers are so mindless, they’re not big roles. If you removed half-a-dozen key expressions from the script — principally of course “OMG!” but also cool! awesome! sick! wow! no way! chill! and sweet! — they’d be pretty much non-speaking parts. The one really enjoyable piece of acting here is by Leslie Mann, Judd Apatow’s partner, who is hilarious as a moronic New Age home-tutoring mom who has her children holding hands and promising to be the best they can — “and so it is – wooh!”

None of the characters has any depth and the story doesn’t go anywhere. So far from being judgmental, Coppola is collaborative with the gang, along for the ride. Her film is more of a specimen than an analysis. Evidence, you might almost say. A great ad for the alarm companies, though.